Apologies, spamming scheme got the better of me
Dear all, I’ve you received an invitation from me by email to join quetchup , please forgive me and delete the message immediately. I never intended for anyone to be invited. It appears this service is a scheme to spam people, which is a thing I would never willingly cooperate with. This website pretends to be a friendly social thing, but instead takes advantage of people.
So please don’t hold it against me, I never intended to spam anyone in whatever way. Only subscribers to my newsletter get regular messages from me.
Thanks,
Martin
New prices
A small change of sorts happened, having to with my prices. Please click here for more information. Thank you.
Dinner Jacket
Here is a picture of a lovely dinner jacket I just finished. The cloth is a beautiful black 100% woolen worsted out of my personal collection, and the lapel facing is some of the best 100% natural silk available on the market. It’s such a pleasure to work with such materials! It’s also a challenge though: Especially with silk, the slightest mistake will ruin it forever, and no amount of pressing or steaming will ever get it back to it’s original beauty. It looks in this picture as if the bottom of the lapels are not the same, but that is only because of the light reflecting off of the delicate sheen of the silk.
I quite fell in love with this one, and I was sorry to see it go.
Lapel Fold
How to shorten the foldline of a lapel&why.
I thought it would be nice to explain something about a dinner jacket I am making for a client in Belgium. I know, my business model changed and I’m not intending to travel so much anymore now that I live in Spain, but it is a very kind gentleman who placed the order, and it’s hard for me to say no. So a dinner jacket for mr C. it is. Anyway it is good to go to Belgium and Holland from time to time. For one, my dear mother lives there, and besides, I still have business going on there from time to time. So on with the story:
What you see here, is the front part of the dinner jacket. The canvass has been padded and basted under the front of the cloth. The pink vertical line on the right indicates where the lapel will fold (in the top, near the collar it folds, and rolls as it moves down, to the right.)
Here I am pointing at the beginning and end of the fold, from the gorge, left, to the button point, right.
What we want to achieve with a canvass chestpiece such as I use, is to create a beautiful chest, with just the right amount of fullness. For that purpose, we take out darts (wedges) in some places, and shape the canvass with steam. Another trick is to ease in certain parts of the cloth, such as the lapel fold. For this, I use a piece of linen stay-tape. On the right, you see two pink lines. One is to mark where the tape ends up when it is simply placed along the fold. The second one, to the left of the first, is where I want the tape to end up. See next pic.
Here, I have pulled the stay-tape down, to the right, while holding it steady on the left. So basically the tape will end up being too short. Note how it is now the second pink line which matches the button point of the canvass.
Basting the stay tape in place, while carefully distributing the excess length in the canvass under the tape.
After basting, you can now clearly see that some extra length was created by pulling the tape. Note how the canvass shows ‘waves’ on both sides of the tape.
This excess length is shrunk away with the iron, so that the cloth and the canvass will end up nice and smooth.
This is why we use this trick: to create a beautifully rolling chest for jackets .
Next visit to Holland and Belgium
From the 30th of July, until 2nd of august, I’ll be once more in Belgium and the Netherlands. I’ll be available for appointments at a location of your choosing, (i.e. work or home address) where I will visit you. This instead of receiving clients in a hotel, which I usually do, but in Holland (my country of origin) I have a fair number of appointments, so it’s much easier to stay flexible and not be tied to a single location.
If you’d like to make an appointment, please send me an email at martinstall@gmail.com, or call me on 0034 656 321 321, or in Holland on 0031 6111 111 61.
For regular updates on future developments, please sign up to my newsletter .
Thank you.
Belgium and Holland in two days
Hello all,
The last suit I made in Holland…
Well, I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear that your favourite nutty ex-monk tailor is still there, going strong, and back at work. After the initial hurdles of moving, and the effort to setup my workroom in my new house, I’ve started cutting and sewing again. And in the light of that jollly bit of news, I’d like to mention that I’ll be in the north next week, fitting and measuring customers.
Specifically, I’ll be in Leuven on the 21st, and in Holland on the 22nd, flying back to Spain the 23rd. So if anyone would like to make an appointment, please contact me by email, at martinstall@gmail.com, or call me on my Spanish mobile number: +34 656 321 321. While I’m up north, I’ll also be reachable on my dutch mobile, +31 6111 111 61.
As I’ll be very busy during the two days I have, I’ll only be able to visit you at a location in the following areas: Brussels/Antwerp, The Hague/Rotterdam/Amsterdam. I realize this might be inconvenient, therefore I apologize. Since I have a few appointments at different locations, I shall not be receiving clients at a hotel, instead I will be more than happy to meet you at your office, home, or other suitable location.
Please let me know as soon as possible in case you are interested, since I have not much space left in my agenda. Thank you.
Visiting The Netherlands and Belgium next week
Next week I’ll be in Holland and Belgium for two days visiting some clients. I don’t have much time left, but if there is anyone interested, I can arrange a few more meetings. As it is a rather impromptu and busy trip, I’m afraid I won’t be taking a hotel as usual. Instead, I will only be able to visit you at your office or home.
If you would like to schedule an appointment, please inform me as early as possible, as I have not much time left in my agenda.
You can choose to meet either June 3rd or 4th. Time of day is to be discussed, depending on your location. I apologize for the inconvenience, and I hope you’ll understand.
If you’d like to be informed of my future travel plans, please sign up to my newsletter.
Thank you.
Finally, back online!
Goodness, when it rains, it pours, doesn’t it? Just as I was about to execute my move to Spain I mentioned in the previous post, my webmaster effectively zapped me off the net. Bankrupt he went, shut down his shop, and without further ado, gone was martinstall.com. Horror! As you may well imagine, I had a few more things to worry about at the time. Packing, loading 20 cubic metres of machines, stock of fabric, furniture, personal belongings and what have you into a truck, finishing up my paperwork and driving the 2500 kilometres to our new house and our new life in Andalucia, Spain. To the amazingly wonderful town of Salobrena. I’d insert a link to some nice info about the town here, but the new webhost needs to tweak a few settings before everything works again, I guess.
Anyway, one of the things that went wrong during the move was that the truck driver refused to drive up to the house, saying he couldn’t make the final turn. And just as I was getting a bit nervous, he simply started his engine and began to drive down the hilll away from my new home. You can probably imagine that I got to be quite nervous. And then -yes I’m very very blessed, and extraordinarily lucky- a miracle happened.
The thing is that people here are quite amazing in how friendly and kind they are. The locals, as well as the foreigners who live here, wether they be from England, Scandinavia, Northern Europe or wherever. So this Belgian guy who owns a bar I had met, had arranged for me to have help from two local teenagers to unload the truck. Now that the truck was down in the village, two pairs of extra hands would hardly be enough to get everything loaded into a van and unloaded into the house. So this Belgian instantly arranged three more guys. Right, so got that problem sorted. Oh, but wait: I didn’t have a van yet!
So in a state very near despair, I called upon another very kind person, the English lady who had arranged the house for us. And lo and behold, she had a friend with a van, who actually is known as: “man with a van”. So she called him up, and asked if he was up for a job. By this time, it was nine pm, which is the end of the working day in Spain. The man was just unlocking his front door when the phone began to ring. And yes, of course, he wouldn’t mind working a bit more. He showed up within half an hour, and together we began to unload. In a dusty parking lot, somewhere on the outskirts of town. Now the driver of the truck had been waiting for two hours, and was in a hurry. So within half an hour, all that I own in thiis world was stacked out in the open air. I asked a friend to keep watch while my six helpers and I began making runs up the hill with the van. And in four hours, I was home. With my shop, my books, clothes and computers, the lot. Boy did I ever enjoy my glass of rioja wine after that!
I learned afterwards that this type of thing is known to happen here quite regularly when people move into the old part of town. It’s a maze of small winding streets going steeply uphill with ridiculously sharp turns. I’m still convinced that the driver could have made that turn, but he looked 19 years of age, and drove as if it was his first run in his new job. I don’t blame him for not wanted to rip the sides of his bosses truck.
Ah well, we learn by experience, don’t we? And in the end all ended up well, just lost a bit more sweat (and money) than foreseen.
Anyway, I must keep in mind that this blog is about the suits, not the guy who makes them, so I’ll keep the charming anecdotes for when we will meet, agreed? And there are plenty. Looking forward to tell them to you.
And sorry, ever so sorry for going offline. I hope it will never happen again.
New plans, houses, clients…
Some of you might wonder why I’ve been so slack with this blog recently. Normally I would hide behind feeble excuses, but this time there is actually a reason why, and I will tell you.
It’s again a story about Martin, not about suits, but it’s relevant to my work, so here goes.
For a long time, my lovely fiancee Gosia, and I, have toyed with the idea of moving away from Holland. Worked on it, rather than toyed, actually.
The tailor’s beauty…
Not that there is anything wrong with Holland, but after having lived in the rural Ardennes region of Belgium for five years back when I was still a monk, I no longer feel at home in a bustling metropolitan area. We want peace and quiet, if possible. So where would we want to go? At first, I thought that moving back to Belgium would be good, but as pretty as the landscape is, the climate there is far less than agreeable. Rather wet, mostly.
For several reasons, Southern Spain has moved up on our list. England was there for a while, but there is something about the quality of life in Spain that can’t be beat. And for a non-english tailor, I do expect competition in England to be Read more
The value of handwork
Shoulder pads. The two in the forefront, with the white stitches on them, I made by hand. I use different materials depending on the effect I’m looking for. Often I combine layers from different ready-made types. Mostly I will use very thin ones. As you can see, I also pre-shape them, so that they will sit nicely over the shoulder.
There was an interesting discussion going on over at the LondonLounge.net yesterday. During it, someone asked me a question and I thought I’d share my reply with you here.
Dear Mr. Stall,
What adds tangible value to the suit?
I have had several discussions on this, the lapels seems to be a point of contention. Many are singing the vertues of a machine stitched for consistency and cleanliness, others preach nothing but hand. How do you stitch your lapels and why, what do you see as the short comings and advantages of either machine or hand.
The machine padded lapels I watched were performed on a $70,000 machine that surely very few small tailors own.
How do most tailoring shops handle lapels?
Your thoughts are most appreciated,
Here is my reply:
Thanks for your questions. I’ll try to give my opinions as neutrally as I can: mind you, I don’t intend to preach, my opinion isn’t the law.
It’s not easy to establish the value of handwork. As I said before, it depends on quality etc. In my shop, all lapels are handpadded. Because I like it that way. I like to have the feel of the cloth. I will treat different cloths very differently, and this is a matter of experience and personal preference. A very soft, thin cloth will have finer and more numerous stitches. A heavy tweed, or overcoat material would become stiff with that kind of padding. So there I might choose larger, looser Read more
